People intend to listen to what they want to listen to.
They feel resonation, reorganization, happiness, and energy when they listen to something they are intending to listen to.
They feel conflict, restlessness, contempt, neglect, avoidance, even depression when they listen to something they are intending to escape from.
Why? As the hearing organ, is the ear the only organ that fulfills the function of listening? If not, what other organs or body structures are performing the listening function together?
This curiosity can be well served by looking at the evolutionary history of a Chinese character 听-listen.
Originally, ancients used an image of mouth-voices entering an ear to describe 听-listen. (Refer to the attached picture)
Later, with the civilization development and language evolution, 听-listen was further explained by the ancients by introducing the straightforward looking eyes and the one pure heart into this character.
What caused the adding of eyes and heart into describing听-listen? I guess the answer relies on the pictographic language itself.
When people speak words, the words were formed up with image-by-image characters in Chinese, drawing what the people would like to express invisibly. The listener receives the invisible images, like playing videos for them to watch invisibly but vividly, through their ears, and also their very focused “third” eyes.
With video of images broadcasting invisibly, the human body calls the brain to store and interpret the information it carries; and also calls the heart to “taste” the information and to “feel” the emotions carried by the images.
As a result of listening, humans got information and emotions passed through the video of images, then judge and filter them through their hearts, unnoticed but loudly inward. At this last step, the un-simplified version聽-listen gives us some clues that human listening is connected to human moral and ethical spirits and energy. How?
The character聽-listen is the only character that shares exactly the same character root with the character德-ethics, morality, virtue.
Furthermore, in Chinese culture, we sometimes regard 德-Ethics, Morality, Virtue in the equality of 得-gain, get, obtain. In another word, with ethical and moral quality, people gain energy.
Thus, pictographically in a summary: the human auditory function of listening is like an energy filter and resonator on the human body. It is performed by the combination of the human ears, eyes, brain, and heart, collaboratively, quietly but quickly.
As said here, let ask a timely question to ourselves:
Are we intending to listen to what nature is telling us in this fast-developing digital age with the massive excessive productivities and materials originated from natural resources while putting her into deeper danger?
#peace #unity #love #kindness #ancientwisdom #chineseculture #ethics #spirituality #virtues #listeningskills #heart
